Effective use of StumbleUpon for your social bookmarking

If you have read some of my other blog posts, you will know that I am a fan of social bookmarking. StumbleUpon is one of my favorites amongst the social bookmarking sites. The reason is that it is a very easy to use and high traffic generating platform. Having said that, it took me a while to find out what brings me the most traffic.

Before I share my experiences with you, let me tell you a little bit about StumbleUpon. It has a Google pagerank of 8 and there are over 9 million users signed up. The easiest way to “stumble” a site is to install the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser. Once that is done, all you need to do is click on the “thumbs up” sign in the toolbar and the site your are visiting is added to StumbleUpon.

The thumb will turn from blue to green, so you know you stumbled this page. There is more that you can do, such as tagging and adding a review, but that is not mandatory.

So, here are my findings:

1. Spend some time getting the title right

The title is the very first thing stumblers see. Obviously, the more enticing your title the better your chances that a reader will click on it to read the article. Just make sure that the title reflects the contents of the post.

2. Add relevant tags

The same StumbleUpon toolbar has a tag icon. When you click on the icon you can add up to 5 tags. Even though it is not mandatory to use tags, I have found that using them helps. Not only will it make it much easier to find the data back at a later date, but it will also help StumbleUpon establish your interests. This will benefit you, because StumbleUpon will start providing you with other potentially relevant sites, based on the tags that you have used in the past.

3. Submit your story at the right time.

I have found that when I submit a story between 6 and 10 am EST during the week and between 3 and 6 pm EST over the weekend I get the most traffic to that page. I suspect that that is because that is when the most Stumblers are online, but I do not know this for a fact.

If you have other experiences with StumbleUpon that can be useful to the readers, please mention them in a comment underneath this post. We can all benefit from your experience.

To your success,